Over 30,000 clay tablets covered in cuneiform writing were found in the ruins of Nineveh (Iraq), the capital of the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal’s (668–631 BC) empire.
The Library was excavated between 1851 and 1932 and a selection of tablets from the Library is on permanent display in Room 55. Despite texts from the Library having been central to the modern study of Assyrian and Babylonian scholarship for almost two centuries, we still know surprisingly little about the Library itself. Researchers have concentrated on studied parts of the Library. Less attention has been paid to what was in the Library as a whole, or what the Library was for.
This project, Reading the Library of Ashurbanipal: a multi-sectional analysis of Assyriology’s foundational corpus, looked at the Library as a whole. It analysed the Library based on detailed, systematic and thorough surveys of the textual and archaeological evidence. It aimed to find out how many tablets there were, where they came from and how much of the ancient Library survives.
